Alex Wang
Eric Parren
Interaction Lab
25 April 2019
Final Essay
My definition of interaction have been constantly developing and evolving ever since I have started taking this course. As mentioned in my Final preparatory research and analysis, My understanding of interaction have three major changes. At first I understood the concept of Interaction as the cycle of giving and receiving information, then through reading the course readings and other content,I realized that it should more accurately be described as the process of giving a certain input and getting a certain feedback according to the input. A second great change to my idea of interaction happened during the production of my midterm project, I decided that a good interaction should be natural to the humans body. That the ways we use for communicating between humans should be the same mechanics that are used to communicate with machines, so that it feels natural. I build my first midterm prototype with that in mind and I can up with a treasure lock that unlocks with hand gestures, which I believe is more natural and comfortable to the user than a traditional combination or password lock. But during the user testing I made a big realization when the users are confused with my project, not knowing what to do with it without the guidance from the designer. This is the third major change to my understanding of interaction that I had made. I learned that not only should the medium through achieving this interaction be natural to the user, but every aspect of the design should be friendly and act as a guidance to indicating the functionalities and expected feedback of the machine, and the machine should give the feedback that the user expects. Just as Don Norman discussed in his research on door design.
With this refined definition of interaction in mind, I want to create some sort of game for my final project. I am currently thinking of creating an archery game with bows and arrows. By combining the Arduino hardware with the Processing software, I would like to have the user feel like they are really doing archery even when everything is digitally programmed and only virtual. A similar kind of interaction exists in virtual reality games, where the user is made to believe that they are actually shooting, as they are aiming and pulling on the bow physically and also receiving graphical information that matches their movement. I really appreciate this kind of interaction as it lines up with my personal values on user experience and the natural feeling to interaction, and I would like to try and replicate this experience with the use of the limited resources that is available to me, since the hardware and software used in a VR console is pretty cutting-edge.